


Mixtures and Spices.

by doubleinfinity



Category: Thor (Movies)
Genre: Ancient History, Asgard, Bondage, Books, Established Relationship, Fallen Angels, Gods, Kissing, Literature, M/M, Miðgarðr | Midgard, Mortality, Sex, Sexual Content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-10
Updated: 2018-07-10
Packaged: 2019-06-08 01:12:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,859
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15232095
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/doubleinfinity/pseuds/doubleinfinity
Summary: A sequence of connected excerpts from Thor and Loki's relationship; emphasis upon Loki's undying desire to feel human.(My beta reader said,you've written a lot of sex.  there isn't that much sex in this, but this is amaturestory.  in every true meaning of the word.  So that might be the only way to explain what this is).





	Mixtures and Spices.

Loki’s continuance is domed by pillars of books.

His slumbers, his waking thoughts; each moment is enraptured by the page numbers he flicks away with his finger, eyes lulling across the paragraphs that absorb his attention.

Often, Thor wonders. This excessive reading… is Loki inserting himself into the stories to be taken elsewhere? Is he seeking knowledge and experience that he feels he cannot gain within the castle? Or is it a scholarly fatuation, something all-consuming that would suffice in the form of sparring and swordfighting to all the other Gods?

There are nights when he finds Loki still tucked under a blanket in the library’s window seat, licking his thumbs and indifferently turning the page.

Once, Thor asked, “if you look so bored while you read, why is it all you do?” and Loki told him that there was nobody else for him to care about.

-

The baths that Loki draws, (sometimes he’s whiny enough to get Thor to run the taps for him, the prick), are treated like sacred recipes, or explosive experiments that may oxidize if they’re not carefully tended to. Thor doesn’t know if they could blow up or not, but Loki is very particular about the way he bathes.

The tub is surrounded by unctuous mixtures and scented spices.

There are egg-shaped glass bottles teeming with sparkling dusts. There are jars full of salt and honey, each with its own measuring cup, so as to not cross-contaminate. He has set up bottles of conditioners, shampoos, lotions, moisturizers, oils… But when they are combined, they are always poured and/or heaped with very restrained calculations.

Tonight Loki is swimming up to his lips in a blue liquid that’s swollen by yellow foam. His hair is drenched already, and he holds one elbow out of the tub, wrist casually hanging in the air.

Thor is in the middle of cleaning up the wet floor when he sees Loki gesture “come” with his finger, surrounded by hot-water vapor that steams off his skin.

“My bath lacks you,” he says, as if Thor is an ingredient- and, well, Loki’s mixtures are _very_ specific.

-

The first time Thor sees Loki interested in something of Midgardian origin, it’s the _The Brothers Karamazov_ , though he can only discern so from the binding and language.

Loki’s wrist is folded under his chin, and he is poised towards the words, scanning them with a keenness.

He never asks, but that fact is nullified by a response. A sigh, actually.

“ _Mortality_.” It’s a plaudit, wrapped in mockery. “Imagine, brother, your flesh equating your existence. Can you perceive such a thing? What it might be like to know that your moments will amount to dust. That there is only a particular amount of books you may read, lessons you may learn, before your body decays. How romantic.”

“How unthinkable.” Thor doesn’t snatch the book away, but maybe he imagines that night, that when Loki is kissing him, Loki’s touch could _perhaps, maybe, somehow_ bear the possibility of being finite. Does it make him fearful or more electric?

-

A time comes when Loki is curious, and Thor finds him bound to the posts of his bed by leather clasps, wrestling against the fetters. They do not inhibit magic, but Thor suspects that Loki refuses to use even a drop of his own to escape them.

When the light is brought into the room by Thor’s hand, Loki’s eyes light up, saying _make me aware of the limits of my own flesh._

Is this what a human desires?

Thor can't relate. He wants to feel his constructed eternity be ever-as cogent within his veins.

-

A chunk of Loki’s hair is taken into Thor’s fist, and he pulls on the strands; pain rains from Loki’s scalp.

The movement thrusts the boy into Thor’s lap, and grinning, he dips his head down to lay kisses all over the skin exposed by Loki’s drawn-open jacket. Bare flesh thriving.

Loki smells like liquid lavender, and his skin is spongy in Thor’s mouth. He’s careful with his teeth, but the God lifts his body between his brother’s incisors like he _wants_ to be bitten. He seems to ask Thor to run the tip of his tongue along each bone in his rib, trailing between the contours so Loki can tell in just how many places his body solidifies.

“Midgard,” Loki breathes heavily, pulling himself up on Thor’s lap and turning so that the older’s jaw lies on his shoulder, breathing onto the back of his neck.

“Tribes of the ancient world left behind relics. Have you heard of the Pyramids, Thor, or the Stonehenges? There are things called Colosseums and Catacombs, and there are even bodies that haven’t yet decayed. What’s more, there are bodies that _have_ and nobody knows where they went. All those inhabitants since the beginning of time, just gone. Swept away.”

Thor grabs Loki’s mouth with his fingers and clamps them shut, winding another arm around the male’s waist.

“They are monuments for _us_ , Thor,” Loki hisses through the cracks. “They just didn’t know our names.”

-

Loki sleepily asks Thor to draw him a bath. He grunts, and starts to run the taps. Loki wants to taste like coconut tonight.

-

Thor cracks him open and drinks, warm milk swirling where blood should be.

Veins are opened all over the place, or at least that’s what Loki feels like. His eyes are closed, but his skin seems to split open- apart from the fact that he is impenetrable and cannot be punctured. Nonetheless, the hemispheres of his brain feel perforated, and neural messages snap over a gap that lights him, majestically.

This is what it is to be human: what it is to be fucked in the heat of Thor’s flesh, there, stirred in warm, speaking lips that alight his cells.

He is anybody. Like every human, he can be all beings, non-exclusive of concept.

Loki is Offred, being led to the markets, and he is a Rochester, sighing beneath a wet tree. He is the Gods: Zeus and Hermes, conjuring lightening and flying through it. He is staring into a portrait of himself at Thor’s eclectic anatomy, watching himself age not a moment as the years pass apathetically.

To be mortal is to be all things at once, for there is too great a risk not to be.

How this _immortality_ imprisons him. He scratches at the surface of his dungeon, and Thor’s skin is what gets underneath his fingernails.

-

Underneath a tree, Loki sleeps with a book on his chest. Its spine is cracked open towards the sky, marking his page.

When he turns, the novel falls to the ground and his place is lost.

Thor is excited to watch Loki frantically search for where he left off, but for now, he silently watches Loki’s Godly jawline murmur against the grass, a placemark that he’s used to mark his development as a deity in Asgard.

-

That’s why he seems to lose all his progress when he’s told: “Loki fell.”

“ _Fell_?” From… grace, from the sky?

There’s a brief gathering around the dining table, and over heaps of steaming boar, everybody learns that Loki has fallen from Asgard itself. Icarus, Thor notes, only backwards. Loki wasn’t close enough to the Heavens. Loki didn’t comprehend himself enough as a God. Maybe the ground below him adhered to his underestimated self and swallowed him through.

“Will he die?” he wants to know. Odin shakes his head. “Of course we cannot die, Thor,” he says with a hint of annoyance. “We are Gods.”

Thor is terrified by the meaninglessness of that statement.

-

Loki is sprawled out on the ground, throwing his head back to moan his laughter. He takes on the mindset of a freed man, even while he notices tears blurring the corners of his eyes.

He wanders for days, all alone on his feet.

An apocryphal life. This is sweetness. There was no love in holding Thor against his chest. There was no _euphoria_ in possessing a lover who would answer his calls, conform to his cries, and come rushing forth in the darkest of nights.

Loki has _true_ romance now. It is the ardor of a lost amour; it is the heavy longing of arms stretched to the sky, hoping for a God to descend and ease his suffering. He can pray to a God, now. He can yearn for a truth. It is all Thor, and the weight in his chest is tragedy. It’s blissful.

There is wet excitement shining in his eyes.

-

He follows immediately.

Thor doesn’t fall, he _plunges_ off Asgard, nose-first.

He doesn’t know that time passes differently. So differently that Loki is already settled into a home, leafing through taxes with very thin, skeletal glasses on the edge of his nose, a curtain-like robe wrapped around him. A cloth belt hangs loose. When he sees Thor on his property, his eyes open wide.

It’s like a God, golden and heavy, has just appeared on the pavement. He rushes to let the anvil inside.

-

Thor notices first that Loki’s books are stacked horizontally, not upright on their spines. Then he sees that Loki smells like flesh. It’s a single element. Not a mixture.

-

The transformation is tough. It involves a lot of hair-pulling; sometimes Loki yanking at his own, sometimes Thor angrily seizing his brother and throwing him to the floor by the familiar locks of black snakes.

“Wake up,” Thor howls at a shocked figure, who seems to be so in awe of him that he can only gape.

Loki wants to be taken into these arms and moved to a land beyond this human one; he wants to greet Gods of Greek origin, battle serpents, and trail along lions’ manes. He wants all the Earthly novels he’s ever read to unravel in front of him, and be true.

But he never gets to do any of this, because he slowly remembers who he is.

The bills fly off the table as he thrusts Thor’s body onto it.

-

Loki lies in Thor’s lap as they eat from boxes of Chinese take-out, Loki with two chopsticks in his fingers, with multiple containers heaped around his legs. The tv glows pale blue on their bodies, and the couch against which Thor leans is littered with 1860’s literature.

“Tourist,” he mutters with mock-scorn as Thor picks up a familiar fork.

-

Finally, Thor asks if Loki will come home.

He already knows the answer, because boxes of Loki’s books are left out on the porch, and his mixtures are herded into a similar container, ready to be moved.

“I will long for this place. And ignorance,” he speaks into the Midgard air, sighing.

There is nothing that could please Thor more than this. However much Loki insists on yearning, he does not wish it to be over him. He would like to kindle the longing within Loki, and then blow gently on the flame, so that the male may release it over Thor with a conviction that comes physically over his flesh.

“Did you learn, brother?”

Loki points his eyes skyward, and he is one, single being.


End file.
